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Psychiatry’s Fraudulent Schemes

According to the United States General Accounting Office, the United States lost approximately $100 billion to health care fraud in 1998. The Justice Department today readily acknowledges health care fraud as the number one white-collar crime, involving all areas of health care. In recent years the largest health care fraud suit in history involved the smallest sector – mental health.

Mark Schlein, Director of the Florida Attorney General’s Medicaid Fraud Control Unit, stated: “What we’ve discovered is that the extent of the fraud is limited only by the imagination. We’ve discovered a huge variety of fraudulent schemes.”

Some of psychiatry’s fraudulent schemes include:

  • Billing for dead patients

  • Fictitious prescriptions

  • Billing insurance companies for sex with patients

  • Charging $150 per day for the use of a television as a therapeutic device

  • Billing for children ages 3 to 5 for treatment of marijuana use

  • Charging $26 for a pregnancy test on a 12-year-old girl a few days after she had commenced her first menstruation

  • Billing patient “wake-up” calls as therapy visits

  • Billing for psychotherapy and other treatments on days when the psychiatrist was out of town or on vacation.

And the list goes on. To find out more about psychiatry’s fraudulent schemes, read CCHR’s publication, Psychiatry: Massive Fraud.

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